While it's still a lot of money I felt the same way. As a percentage of their overall budget, that's not a lot of moeny for an institution to lose track of, considering the entire DoD is not audit-ready and hasn't done an audit in many many years.

I had the same memory as you, but after looking it up an hour ago, I'm willing to write that one off as a bit conspiracy-theorist. It seemed like it was in the context of upgrading their systems to track this sort of stuff.